Tom Brady's Diet Is for Joyless Cyborgs

Coffee? ‘Never tried it.’ Salt? ‘A little bit.’

By Evan Bleier

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As a lifelong New England Patriots fan that's seen his team go from laughingstock of the NFL to one of — if not the — best dynasties in modern sports history, I’d do a lot for Tom Brady.

Ride to the airport? Sure. Help clean the gutters? No problem. Take a sack from Von Miller? But of course!

However, if No. 12 asked your humble correspondent to eat like him for a day, I’d have to punt.

The primary reason — besides there aren’t enough shredded walk-through tapes in Foxborough to convince me that Brady's wellness guru Alex Guerrero is anything but a silver-tongued snake oil salesman — is that I violate the terms of Brady’s diet by the time I have my morning coffee ... By the time I having my morning coffee, people!

As impossible as it is avoiding those things, what’s even more difficult to fathom is the list of foods Brady ingests on an “an average day,” as detailed in his new book.

In The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, which was just excerpted on Boston.com, the 40-year-old says his breakfast consists of a 20-ounce glass of water spiked with electrolyte concentrates followed by a smoothie of blueberries, bananas, seeds and nuts. The meal is finished off with a protein shake containing almond milk.

Lunch? “Often a piece of fish, but always with lots of vegetables” followed by another protein shake, a protein bar or some fruit (always eaten on its own to avoid digestion problems).

For dinner, it's “another nutrient-dense meal that includes a lot of vegetables,” which, if Brady is feeling especially frisky, he might chase with an appetizing cup of bone broth as a nightcap substitute.

“The regimen I follow is a mix of Eastern and Western philosophies. Some of these principles have been around for thousands of years,” Brady writes in the book. “My nutritional regimen may seem restrictive to some people, but to me it feels unnatural to eat any other way. Many people have conditioned their bodies to a nutritional regiment made up of lots of white or pale-looking foods —french fries, potato chips, white bread, chicken nuggets — that don’t exist in nature.”